Lianzhou Foto 2014

Staging Encounters: Ten Years of Contemporary Photography in China Digital technologies and the internet have brought about earth shattering change. Due to these technical revolutions, photography has already entered a post-media era. Because photography is highly reliant on technical developments, its post-media characteristics have made it an important narrative medium. Even though most of us still follow in the footsteps of modernism, pursuing the new and unique in contemporary photography, we have already been influenced by the new era. Perhaps we should be more broad-minded, and we might be able to relax if we look at art as a means and not an end. Art is the road to a spiritual paradise, and we now need to inspect the stones along this road at each point in time. We have focused on the last decade (2005-2014) because, ten years ago, we established a photography festival in the little city of Lianzhou. In this time, we have followed this artistic road and explored the practice of contemporary Chinese photography. In “Staging Encounters” (taken from “Photography as Adventure” by Roland Barthes), we have collected the last ten years of Chinese contemporary photography into a book and an exhibition. We are not interested in creating narratives based on historical methods or art historical models. Instead, we use various disciplines and do not limit ourselves to any single model. To formulate these narratives, we have divided the artists’ works into eight sections. These sections are not summaries of specific forms or schools, but the content and form of the works in each section overlap somewhat, which facilitates the establishment of the narrative.